by Alice Ozma
He ate in silence for a few minutes. I slid my sandwich behind me and rustled through the bag until I found some cheese crackers, which I munched thoughtfully.
“Eat with your mouth closed!” my father barked after my first bite. Open-mouthed chewing was one of his biggest annoyances. “You can hang by one hand in front of a hundred people or more, but you can’t hold your lips shut while you eat cheese crackers?”
I held my lips shut and continued thinking. I wasn’t scared to go up if I knew what I was doing, and I could figure it out quickly enough, but I needed at least a dress rehearsal on the ground before I attempted the real thing. How could two adults, two men with jobs and wives (even if my mother and father were rapidly losing interest in each other) and an interest in science museums, expect a child to perform acrobatics midair without at least a quick dress rehearsal? It was absurd. I wouldn’t do it. I’d decided.
“There he is!” my father shouted, as the performer walked by again, this time in a different costume. “I’ll go talk to him. Finish your sandwich before I take it from you!”
He headed down the stairs and disappeared into the crowd, which was much thicker now that school groups were flooding the atrium for lunch. I slid down from my perch, tinfoil-wrapped mess in hand, and scraped all but a few crumbs into the nearest trash can. As any picky-eating, low-appetite, food-wasting kid knows, a clean plate is too obvious. You have to leave a few crumbs, and you have to have some on your face. I had that covered. I settled back into my seat just as my dad was approaching again.
“No luck,” he called, shaking his head as he climbed back up. “They couldn’t find a costume in your size that didn’t have sweat stains on it, and then his wife got her strength back at the last minute.”
“Oh really?” I replied. “That’s a shame, I was going to go up.”
In that moment, I decided it was true. It was a great opportunity. Practice would have made me better, sure, of course, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t ready to go up now. I could have figured it out as I went along. That’s what we’d been doing for the past few weeks, making progress every night as I snuggled up next to him in his great big bed and listened to the books he considered classics. We’d been trying for something that seemed impossible and making it up as we went. It was working for us.
“Yes,” I continued with great certainty, “I would have been glad to help. If they really needed me. Or even if they didn’t. If there was a costume in my size, I would have gone up. Other kids would have liked seeing a kid up there. And I’d be good at it, I bet.”
My father smiled.
“I bet,” he repeated.
“Maybe next time.”
“Maybe next time,” he repeated, pulling another sandwich from the bag and placing it on my lap.
CHAPTER THREE
Day 100
Mary was an odd, determined little person, and now she had something interesting to be determined about, she was very much absorbed, indeed.
—Francis Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden
My father closed the book with a sense of finality, despite the fact that we had a night or two worth of reading left. We’d made quite a dent in Be a Perfect Person in Just Three Days by Stephen Manes. The book was a short little paperback about a boy who was reading a guide to life improvement that featured some truly bizarre advice. In last night’s reading, the guide prompted the boy to put a piece of broccoli on a string around his neck, and we’d howled with laughter at the idea that something so silly could actually change someone’s life. Even after we’d closed it, we stayed nestled under the covers of his bed, laughing and talking about the strange guide. Tonight’s chapter was just as funny, maybe even more so, but when we finished there was no laughter—well, not at first. We sat in silence for a moment or two, smiling. Then out of excitement, I did start giggling. He laughed too, but I’m not sure what he thought we were laughing about. The uncertainty made it even funnier, so we laughed until we found our way back to silence. When we sat quietly again, the air had an odd ring to it, as though it too didn’t quite know what to feel. After all the anticipation and nerves, the balancing act we’d been doing, here we were. We had finished one hundred nights of reading. We had met our goal.
“What should we do to celebrate?” my father asked.
Neither of us could think of anything. We were happy, very happy, but we never did much celebrating. Years later, when my sister got into Yale, my father bought her one medium pizza from Papa John’s. Which really should not have been a surprise, considering what my father eventually suggested to recognize our reading achievement.
“Let’s go to Flick’s in the morning,” he said, sounding surprisingly excited. Well, the excitement was only surprising if you’d been to Flick’s.
Flick’s Cafe was best described as noncommittal. It was a small, nondescript building on the somewhat poor side of town, but by no means in the ghetto. It was rectangular and squat, with ceilings that were a bit low, but only if you really stopped to look at them. The walls were white, the floors were tiled. The tables were gray, with seats that might have gotten uncomfortable after an hour or so, but the food was always out before anyone noticed. The room smelled strongly of cigarettes, as nearly every customer lit one before or after a meal, but the air never quite got hazy. This was the place where we went to celebrate, and not because there wasn’t anywhere better in Millville, New Jersey.
Well, actually, there wasn’t anywhere better in Millville, to us. We had been going to Flick’s for years—we couldn’t even remember how the tradition started. It wasn’t like my father to eat out, let alone in a sit-down establishment (or, as he describes it, the kind of place “where the butler comes around”). Somewhere along the way, though, Flick’s had become the only place where my father didn’t mind the “butler” and didn’t even seem to mind putting down ten or fifteen dollars to help start the morning off right.
We came in and sat at our usual table by the door. We didn’t need to ask for menus, because we were ordering our usual meals—pancakes for my father and cinnamon-raisin French toast for me. We kept this routine every time, as though we were making up for the noncommittal atmosphere of the place by being extremely committed ourselves. It wouldn’t have seemed like much of a celebration, since it hardly differed from our norm, but again, the air had that charged feeling of accomplishment. This time the hum was most likely the air-conditioning unit beside our table, but there was still something wonderful and electrifying about the morning. Though you couldn’t see the sun through the small window behind us, there were no clouds in sight and the sky was the color of an Easter egg, freshly dyed and still dripping from the experience.
I sipped a glass of iced tea, unsweetened and with lemon as always, as we waited for our food. My father, who waits until his meal comes to get a beverage, just rested his hands on the table and looked around at the other customers. He smiled a sort of goofy, far-off smile that must have attracted some attention, because the chef and owner walked over. We knew him well from our frequent visits and he usually came out to say hello, but this time he made a point of doing it before we even got our food, which was unusual.
“Jim,” he said, wiping his hands on a dishtowel as he came out from the kitchen, “I’ve just got to ask—did you win the lottery or something? Because you haven’t stopped smiling since you sat down, and you haven’t even gotten my world-famous pancakes yet.”
“Lovie, do you want to tell him?”
No matter how many times we visited Flick’s, I still felt shy talking to Mr. Flickinger himself. He had a cheerful, childlike attitude that intimidated me more than the stuffiness of most adults. He was hard at work, but he seemed to be as happy and playful as a kitten first discovering string. He was always so genuinely happy to see us. I worried that if I couldn’t match his enthusiasm first thing in the morning, he would think I was bland and dull. There is something about chipper adults that I’ve always found both inspiring and exhausting.
&n
bsp; “Well, Mr. Flickinger…,” I began.
“Call me Flick, you know that,” he said with a wink.
“Well, Flick,” I said, “we did it. We read for one hundred nights.”
Just after the words had left my mouth, I realized that he probably had no idea what I was talking about. In the past fifteen or so nights, my father and I had become so driven, so goal-oriented, I had forgotten that not everyone was on a reading streak. In my mind every family was trying for a reading record. Maybe they had set the bar lower, since one hundred nights seemed impressive even once it was over, but didn’t every child crawl into bed after a hot bath and snuggle up to hear a chapter or two of Ramona the Pest or James and the Giant Peach? I even thought, after reconsidering, that Flick simply didn’t know because he didn’t have children. Then I had to remind myself that nothing about this was normal—in the best possible way, of course—and that it might require some explanation. That was when my father jumped in.
“Well, Flick, we set a goal a while back to read for one hundred nights in a row without missing a night. Last night was the crowning gem, the one hundredth night, so we came out to celebrate in style with some of your greasy slop.”
To my father, all food is “slop,” or “greasy slop,” and the implication that Flick’s was a stylish spot for festivities did not come off without a hint of sarcasm, whether it was intended or not. Flick laughed and blushed a little, probably trying to decide if he was mildly offended or completely honored. Knowing how most people react to my father, it was probably a combination of the two that Flick hadn’t realized he could feel until that very moment.
“Well this is quite the little party, then!” he said, after his face faded back to its natural color. He should have gone back to the grill a minute or two before, but nothing captured his sense of wonder more than a good story. He stood beside the table and began asking us questions.
Had it been hard? No, not particularly. We were already in the habit of reading almost every night, as we always had, so it hadn’t been much of an adjustment. Really, we decided, even if we hadn’t been trying to keep a streak, we would have missed only six or seven of those nights. Maybe even less.
Which nights would we have missed? Well, it crossed our minds to read every night, so we never would have forgotten. But there were times when other factors would have persuaded us to take the night off, to go to bed, and leave our book untouched for just an evening. When I was sick, for example, and afraid of getting close to my father for fear of giving him the flu, I might have stayed away. Or when we stayed out particularly late (for a nine-year-old) on a couple of day trips, getting back at ten or eleven from a show or a baseball game, I think we both would have preferred slouching off to our beds and pulling the covers up to our noses. We never did, of course, because we had a goal, but the temptation was certainly there.
Did we finish every book? Well, every one so far.
Didn’t the routine get boring after a while? This seemed like a silly question, and even sillier coming from a man who methodically cooked us the same meals every time we walked through his door. We were already good at routines, but The Streak was anything but. Every night was different because every story was different. Even when a book started to drag, as some did late in the second half, there was still the thrill of getting closer to our goal to make things a little more interesting. But as my father told him, and as anyone who reads regularly might agree, the only thing that has to be similar from night to night is the act of turning pages. Everything else changed as soon as we picked up a new book, plunging us deep into a new landscape with unfamiliar faces. The Streak was routine, yet it was as far from routine as anything a parent and daughter could do together.
And finally, Flick asked: what happens next? We both looked at him as though we expected him to keep talking, like he knew the answer to his own question and was just asking it as a hypothetical. We smiled at him, without saying anything, because we hadn’t really talked about it yet. Mostly, we’d been talking about how we would celebrate, but we hadn’t even finalized that plan until last night. We knew we would keep reading, because it was what we always did. But what came next? We shrugged and pushed our eyebrows together. We both pretended that we hadn’t really been thinking about it, because we had to talk it over before we announced our official plan. My father has a competitive side that pushes him to challenge himself even in private, so it would have been impossible for him to back down from a goal once he’d told someone else. When Mr. Flickinger walked away and returned with our plates, we settled down to business.
“We need to figure out our game plan, Lovie.”
I opened five butter packets as fast as I could while I considered. My father’s hands always shook, and he had difficulty doing tasks that required precision, such as separating the golden foil from the plastic tub on the butter packets you get in restaurants. He liked five with his pancakes, and he liked to spread the butter while the pancakes were still piping hot, so it would melt evenly. We formed a small assembly line—I would pass him one, he would use it while I opened the next and prepared to pass it. It went without comment.
“You know,” I said when his pancakes were fully buttered and I was free to enjoy my own meal, “I have been giving this a lot of consideration. Deep consideration. And after this consideration, I have decided that it is only logical for us to go for a thousand nights.”
I mimed peering over my glasses and then writing a prescription. I expected my father to laugh, but his eyes got wider and wider. He stopped chewing.
“One thousand nights! What happened to two hundred, or five hundred? What’s got you thinking that we should automatically multiply by ten? If we have to do that one more time, we’ll go up to ten thousand nights, and I’ll have to read to you in the old folks’ home, shouting into your hearing aid.”
“I never said anything about ten thousand nights. I said a thousand nights. Yes, that’s ten times more than The Streak so far, but was it really so hard? I mean up until this point, to get where we are, was it really that tough? I feel like it wasn’t. Well, it wasn’t for me.”
The words came out all jumbled because the idea had only occurred to me a minute or two ago. I can’t remember what I was originally going to suggest, but one thousand nights wasn’t it. Still, once I said it, it sounded right. One thousand nights. The one-thousand-night reading streak—that was still one less than the Arabian Nights, and just as impressive.
“Well,” my father said, staring at his pancakes as though they were the ones challenging him and not me, “a lot can happen in a thousand nights. That’s years, you know. You’re only nine now. How old will you be then? Who knows what our lives will be like?”
Again, he looked at his pancakes instead of me. I looked over to see if they said something. Maybe the syrup had spelled out some sort of message of the future that would give my father guidance in making his decision. If it did, the syrup was on my side, because he shook his head and finally said, “But I guess it couldn’t hurt to try. What the heck. One thousand nights.”
I clapped my hands delightedly and waved my arms above my head. This felt like a moment I had been planning for quite some time, even if the idea had just occurred to me. Maybe it had been growing in the back of my mind for months. It couldn’t have seemed more logical.
Our waitress must have interpreted my clapping and gesturing as a call for Mr. Flickinger, because when she stepped out of the kitchen he followed her back to our table.
“How’s the food? Worthy of the occasion?”
I gave my father a quick, eager glance and he laughed.
“Flick, I think my daughter wants me to share some big news with you. Your restaurant has become the official sponsor of The Streak, I guess, because we set a new goal before we even finished our slop. One thousand nights. That was her idea, by the way.”
He pointed at me with his knuckle as he licked syrup off of his forefinger.
I beamed up at Flick, but he look
ed more confused than impressed.
“Well, isn’t that nice,” he said with his usual enthusiasm, but not any extra.
He asked a few questions about the food, checked on our drinks, and returned to the kitchen. He was smiling, but he didn’t make the great recipient of our big news that I would have liked.
That was the first time I realized that no one, not really anyone, completely understood what we were attempting. What we were doing.
CHAPTER FOUR
Day 185
What is detestable in a pig, is more detestable in a boy.
—Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
Are all of our members here?” my father asked.
I pointed at myself, then at him, then nodded.
“Well then. I suppose we can call this meeting to order.”
I scooched down into the hole between the vent and the window. My shirt got stuck on a nail, but my father quickly noticed and unpinned me. Tucked away from the rest of the museum, in a corner no one ever noticed, our club got under way.
“We have to sing the theme song,” I said, “or else it’s not an official meeting.”
I cleared my throat as though I were preparing to sing opera, rubbing my neck and then moving my neck in slow, rounded movements that I’d learned from my music teacher at school. The song was brief, but the most important part of the meeting. It had to be done right—no sloppiness or silliness.
“We’re the Booooy-Haters’ Club of Ameeeerica-dun!” we sang in unison.
“I think it needs to be a little louder,” I said, as I noticed that some people walking by in the next room over hadn’t even given us a glance. One of the number one guidelines of a club song is that it should attract attention. It’s all about announcing to the world that you are here and ready to start your meeting, whether they like it or not. And if they were boys, we hoped they didn’t like it at all.
